The Language and Literature of Jared Loughner

Jared Loughner has invoked his rights under the Fifth Amendment and is not coöperating with investigators in Arizona, after allegedly shooting more than twenty people on Saturday. His silence has left the press to speculate as to his motives, by doing some durable “ask-the-neighbors” reporting, but also by interpreting his social-media profile pages, as well as a series of disjointed and chilling YouTube videos—one of which shows a figure that has been identified as Loughner, disguised in a trash bag and dark hooded sweatshirt, setting an American flag on fire, and another, text-based video, in which he writes faulty logic puzzles about currency, God, the Constitution, and—particularly eye-catching for this blog—the alphabet, the meaning of words such as “terrorist,” and the government’s misuse of language: “The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar [sic].”

Loughner’s claim, that the government controls its people by manipulating their grammar, was not an isolated rant, but may in fact be a central factor of what police have identified as an orchestrated and premeditated attack. Mother Jones has published an exclusive interview with a friend of Loughner’s, Bryce Tierney, who suggests that Loughner’s obsession with language may have sparked a long standing hatred of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords:

Tierney, who’s also 22, recalls Loughner complaining about a Giffords event he attended during that period. He’s unsure whether it was the same one mentioned in the charges—Loughner “might have gone to some other rallies,” he says—but Tierney notes it was a significant moment for Loughner: “He told me that she opened up the floor for questions and he asked a question. The question was, ‘What is government if words have no meaning?’”

Giffords’ answer, whatever it was, didn’t satisfy Loughner. “He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question,’ and I told him, ‘Dude, no one’s going to answer that,’” Tierney recalls. “Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”

Much of the response to this weekend’s horrific crime has focussed on the vitriol that dominates contemporary political discourse. The argument is that language, when spiked to a frenzy by violent metaphors and unhinged hyperbole, can inspire violence in a person already destabilized by mental illness. Perhaps. But in this odd and unsettling case, grammar itself may have been a motive.

Just as political assassins immediately get a third name—he’s now referred to in some quarters as Jared Lee Loughner—so do their reading lists come under intense scrutiny, as if books, so often ignored as cultural objects in daily life, suddenly become the key to everything. Laura Miller has an incisive piece at Salon about what we can and cannot learn from what Loughner listed on his YouTube profile page as his favorite books, titles that range from “Peter Pan” to “Mein Kampf.” Most of the list looks like that of any American schoolkid in his early twenties: “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “To Kill A Mockingbird.” (Absent, as Miller notes, is “The Catcher in the Rye.”) As to political content, the presence of “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto” has been fodder for folks on both the left and the right, evidence that Loughner is a Nazi, white-supremacist, a liberal, or a socialist—namely, a member of some other fringe group. Miller rightly insists that this list is less important to consider than Loughner’s manifest mental instability, and diagnoses members of the press with a similar kind of madness: “By studying Loughner’s book list for clues to the political leanings that somehow “drove” him to commit murder, commentators are behaving a lot like crazy people themselves.”

Read more New Yorker coverage of the Arizona shooting and its aftermath.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.

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Although the N.F.L. has long banned substances such as anabolic steroids and growth hormones, the First Amendment is believed to be the only right guaranteed by the Constitution to be included on the list.